The history of human society is also the history of the quest for redemption, liberation and the righting of the world. Priests and prophets, poets and intellectuals, thinkers and doers, all look to the future with a yearning to return to the long-lost Garden of Eden, or with an aspiration to a better world – a new Eden.

The Department of Education at the Jewish Agency is launching a multi-annual project focusing on visions for the Jewish people and for the state of Israel. Alongside this we will, for the first time, run an international competition on this theme. This competition will take place in the course of 2004 – the centenary year of the death of Theodor Herzl, the visionary of Zionism. Jewish students in Israel and the Diaspora will be invited to enter essays and works of art in which each expresses his or her own personal vision.

The present anthology is a first, experimental edition, designed to present readers with a wide range of works on the theme of Vision and Covenant. We hope to initiate a process that will regenerate public dialogue regarding the future of the Jewish nation and the State of Israel, and foster cultural reflection and futuristic thinking. We believe in the power of the vision to shape the future, and in the need for a social contract: we believe in vision and covenant.